Category: Uncategorized

SAN FRANCISCO, CA – 26NOVEMBER19 – Workers who prepare food for airlines and their supporters picket Terminal 2 and are arrested with their supporters in a civil disobedience action at San Francisco International Airport. Workers are protesting the failure of the companies who run the flight kitchens to agree on a fair contract with their union, Unitehere Local 2. Low wages force many workers to work an additional job besides their job in the airline food kitchens.

Washington State today is ground zero in the effort to hold back the massive use of agricultural guest workers by U.S. growers, and to ensure that farmworkers, both those living here and those coming under the H-2A visa program, have their rights respected. For a second year, on August 4 workers and their supporters marched 14 miles in 90-degree heat through berry fields just below the Canadian border, protesting what they charge is widespread abuse of agricultural labor.

“Farmworker families have been living and working in local fields since the early 1950s,” according to Rosalinda Guillen, director of Community to Community, a farm worker organizing and advocacy group in Whatcom County. “But we’ve seen a big increase in growers’ use of the H-2A guest worker program in the last few years, and it’s had a huge impact on working conditions in the fields. We’ve had to feed guest workers who come to us hungry, fight to get them paid their wages, and help them deal with extreme work requirements. At the same time, our local workers find they’re not being hired for jobs they’ve done for many seasons.”

TIJUANA, BAJA CALIFORNIA NORTE, MEXICO – 29MAY16 – On the Mexican side of the border wall between Mexico and the U.S. families greet other family members on the U.S. side. This takes place every Sunday at the Parque de Amistad, or Friendship Park, in Playas de Tijuana, the neighborhood of Tijuana where the wall runs into the Pacific Ocean. Catelina Cespedes, Carlos Alcaide and Teodolo Torres greet Florita Galvez, who is on the other side. The family came from Santa Monica Cohetzala in Puebla to meet at the wall.Copyright David Bacon

Systemic disaster or shock can open possibilities for social change not available in the US during normal times; the Covid-19 pandemic is such a crisis. The right wing will seek to exploit the situation; what will the Left do? The CCDS discussion will present an overview and examples, with two speakers:

Bill Fletcher — How the Right is using the crisis to advance its agenda.

The presentations will be followed by Q&A and discussion, including suggestions for new ways of online organizing..

the speakers:

Marilyn Albert is a retired Registered Nurse with over 40 years of experience; she worked in the New York City hospitals for most of her career. She has been active in the movement for single payer health care since the 1970s. She is a founding member of the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism and lives in Richmond, California.

Bill Fletcher Jr. is a former president of TransAfrica Forum, writer, commentator trade unionist and activist. His books include: The Man Who Fell From the Sky (fiction); Claim No Easy Victories: The Legacy of Amilcar Cabral (co-editor); ‘They’re Bankrupting us’ – And Twenty other myths about unions; and Solidarity Divided: The Crisis in Organized Labor and A New Path Toward Social Justice.

THE TELECONFERENCE will consist of 3 two-hour sessions, each with 45 minutes for Q&A. The first will begin at noon EST, followed by an hour break. A second will be from 3-5pm EST. A final session will take place from 6- 8 pm EST. A headset & webcam, or a smartphone, is recommended

THE 21st CENTURY HAS BROUGHT NEW FORMS OF CAPITALISM – from the globalization of production, to financial speculation, to new kinds of cross-national class formations. Paralleling these changes in the nature of national and global capitalism have been new resistance from Arab Spring, the Occupy Movement, to the Pink Tide in Latin America, to international boycott campaigns, to global worker mobilizations to fight Covid 19. Given the rise of neoliberal globalization, drone warfare, crippling economic blockades, a burgeoning climate crisis, and new forms of rightwing populism organized around racism, sexism and revanchism, it is time for the left to have a serious conversation about twenty-first century imperialism.